Davis campaign launches payday attack on Abbott with fuzzy math

UPDATE: Davis spokesman Bo Delp said the miscalculation of payday donor money to Abbott was his fault.

“I had not realized that there were duplicates on the TEC website, so the number came out different,” he said.

ORIGINAL STORY:

AUSTIN — The Wendy Davis gubernatorial campaign has been pounding Attorney General Greg Abbott, the presumptive Republican nominee for the state’s top spot, on the issue of payday lenders over the last couple of days.

And on Friday, the campaign launched a fresh payday attack on Abbott, but it did so with inaccurate figures and has yet to publicly fess up to the mistake.

It all started when the El Paso Times’ Marty Schladen dropped a gem of story with controversial comments from the official who runs the state agency responsible for protecting consumers from predatory lending practices. That story has been attack fodder all week for the Davis campaign, first calling for that state official’s ouster and then turning the tables on Abbott by egging him to weigh in.
That brings us to Friday’s blast from the Davis campaign: a sharply-worded press release that criticizes Abbott for remaining “silent” on the issue while reaping “nearly $400,000 dollars and counting from the payday lending industry.”

The problem: The Davis campaign math is way off. Like, not even close.

According to the Davis Campaign, Abbott received the following sums from the following entities:

$165,000 from Trevor Ahlberg of Cottonwood Financial

$100,250 from Tracy Young/TitleMax/TMX Finance

$111,500 from Cash America’s political committee

$10,000 from Consumer Lenders PAC

A search through Texas Ethics Commission data shows something very different. In fact, the only figure the Davis campaign got correct was the $10,000 cash injection from the Consumer Lenders PAC.

$55,000 from Trevor Ahlberg of Cottonwood Financial

$12,500 from Tracy Young/TitleMax/TMX Finance

$21,500 from Cash America’s political committee

$10,000 from Consumer Lenders PAC

That brings the Abbott total from these four payday entities to about $99,000 — still sizable but far from the roughly $386,000 cited in the David press release.

In part, some of it looks like sloppy math and a general unfamiliarity with how the Texas Ethics Commission website can often produce duplicate contributions when prompted to produce a spread sheet via an advanced inquiry.

Take the case of Trevor Ahlberg, the payday lending executive who the Davis folks say donated $165,000 to Abbott. A spread sheet produced by the Ethics Commission site will show Ahlberg gave Abbott five individual donations of $25,000 on June 28.

The Davis campaign also originally said TitleMax CEO Tracy Young donated more than $100,000 but in an email to the San Antonio Express-News/Houston Chronicle after question about miscalculations arose, a Davis spokeswoman changed that figure to $12,500.

The spokeswoman offered no explanation for the change.

The Abbott campaign said the inaccurate figures appear to be “more theatrics from Sen. Davis and her campaign.”

One last note: The Davis campaign apparently knew the $386,000 figure was wrong by late Friday afternoon and admitted as much to at least one reporter, but has not issued a correction to state media.

When the Express-News/Houston Chronicle emailed the campaign to get answers on potential miscalculations, a Davis spokeswoman responded with several corrections to the original press release and provided a new list with a total of 13 payday donors — up from the four in the original press release).

The Davis campaign calculated that those 13 donors gave about $355,000 to Abbott, which is also incorrect.

Delp, the Davis spokesman, recalculated the donor total and came up with about $255,000 from those 13 entities, a figure which he said shows “that Greg Abbott is in the pocket of the payday lending industry and is deflecting questions on his position on predatory loans and William White’s resignation.”

That figure included a revamped tally of Ahlberg’s donations but still had $40,000 in duplicate donations from Rod Aycox, who runs the vehicle-title lending company Select Management Resources. In all, the Express-News/Houston Chronicle estimates those 13 entities gave Abbott between about $190,000 and $205,000.